Super Furry Animals тобының «Phantom Power» альбомы

Album by Super Furry Animals

Phantom Power is the sixth album by Welsh indie rock band Super Furry Animals, released on 21 July 2003 by Epic Records in the United Kingdom. The record was originally conceived as a ten song concept album using D A D D A D guitar tuning, but the band chose to abandon this idea during recording as they didn't want to constrain themselves. The group did attempt to create a "more coherent" album than their past efforts by choosing songs which worked well together. Phantom Power was recorded at the band's own studio, AV Happenings, in Cardiff with the Super Furries producing and engineering themselves for the first time. According to chief songwriter and vocalist Gruff Rhys, the album's lyrics deal with "broken relationships and war". The album, like their previous record Rings Around the World, was simultaneously released on CD, vinyl and DVD. The DVD featured a surround sound mix of the album along with animations, commentary by Mario Caldato Jr. (who mixed the record) and remixes. The majority of these remixes were re released as the album Phantom Phorce in 2004. Phantom Power was well received, with many critics suggesting it was the best album of the band's career. The group took a hands on approach to the actual recording sessions for Phantom Power, engineering and producing themselves for the first time. According to bassist Guto Pryce this involved a fair amount of trial and error as the band "didn't really know what [they] were doing". Soundproof booths were improvised by setting up tents in the office corridors: "we'd record a guitar and it'd sound rubbish and we had to figure out why. So we started experimenting with different tent designs. In the end it was the wigwam that was easiest to put up and sounded best". The ten song D A D D A D concept was eventually abandoned with Pryce stating "we don't like constraining ourselves and if you've got a concept, you're doing that. And we had some other really nice tunes so we just chose the best songs". Many tracks feature close vocal harmonies, with all the band apart from Pryce contributing. Frustration with the George Bush administration and its foreign policy influenced the record with Rhys claiming that he feels qualified to address the subject as United States foreign policy "effectively decides what the foreign policy is in the UK". "The Piccolo Snare" is about "societies torn apart by war and the waste of human life". The track uses the vocabulary of the Falklands War (Tumbledown, Skyhawks etc.) but Rhys claims it is applicable to any war. "Liberty Belle" tells the story of two cartoon characters devised by Rhys, 'Liberty Belle' and 'Memory Lane', the former representing the "bells of freedom", specifically the American Dream, and the latter representing "history's harsh lessons" which Liberty Belle has failed to learn. The song is told from the perspective of a "bird living almost in a parallel universe to humans, oblivious to the gravity of the games which are being played around us", something which Rhys admits to feeling himself much of the time. "Venus and Serena" uses a story of a child who talks to his pet tortoises, Venus and Serena, as he can't communicate with his elders to make a similar point: that people feel alienated from their elected leaders. Both "Out of Control" and "Slow Life" feature regurgitated media buzzwords, with "Out of Control's" "flippant" lyrics designed to create the feel of "an over dramatic theme to a current affairs programme". "Bleed Forever" deals specifically with the nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl disaster which fell over North Wales, allegedly causing an increase in incidents of leukaemia among children in the area. However, Rhys has been keen to point out that the record is not a forcefully political one, claiming that most of the band's songs are "fragments of daily life; occasionally politics are a part of that. Super Furry Animals is about exploration, not political campaigning". Keyboardist Cian Ciaran stated at the time of Phantom Power's release that the band would issue a DVD with every future album, claiming that "this is just the way we make records now". However, the band's next two albums, Love Kraft and Hey Venus!, were not made available on DVD and, in a 2008 interview with Uncut, Rhys suggested that the release had been something of a failure: "no one gave a shit because people just want to rock n' roll!" The remixes on the DVD version of Phantom Power vary from radical reworkings such as Killa Kella's beatbox treatment of "Golden Retriever" and Wauvenfold's "unrecognisable" version of "Sex, War and Robots", to the likes of Mario Caldato Jr's take on "Liberty Belle" and High Llamas' "Valet Parking" which are merely "spruced up". The majority of the remixes were reissued on CD as the album Phantom Phorce in 2004. According to drummer Dafydd Ieuan the band didn't have the money to pay the artists involved for their remix work so, in order to provide them with royalties, promised to release an album featuring the tracks on their own label, Placid Casual. Hidden footage of the band firing machine guns can be reached by selecting the song "The Undefeated", waiting 22 seconds until the lettering starts to blink and pressing 'Enter' ('Enter' must be pressed before the lettering blinks for a second time at 24 seconds). Guitarist Huw Bunford has described this footage as being "exactly how it looked on the tin noisy, full of testosterone, with pumped up guys in the woods trying to kill furry animals!"

ChartPeakpositionIreland Albums Chart12U. S. Top Independent Albums14